RUBINSTEIN, ANTON GBEGOR. 



705 



23 at Steinway Hall, and aroused his audience 

 to the greatest enthusiasm. The fame of his 

 playing spread like flame, and at the second con- 

 cert on Sept. 25 the hall was jammed. His per- 

 formance of his own difficult C major etude 

 moved his hearers to great 'excitement, and the 

 news of his triumph spread through the country 

 so that his arrival in every city was greeted with 

 acclamations. On returning to Europe he re- 

 sumed his concert tours, and in 1887, on the re- 

 tirement of Davidoff from the directorship of 

 the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Rubinstein was 

 induced to accept the post once more. He now 

 established the celebrated annual competition in 

 composition and piano playing, which attracted 

 to St. Petersburg some of the, most promising 

 young musicians in Europe. In 1885-'86 he 

 gave his famous series of historical recitals in 

 St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, Berlin, Lon- 

 don, Paris, and Leipsic. In this series he played 

 from memory in chronological order examples 

 from the entire range of piano music from Pur- 

 cell to Liszt. In 1889 the fiftieth anniversary 

 of his first appearance at Moscow as a juvenile 

 prodigy was celebrated by a festival lasting four 

 days. Among the features of this unique jubilee 

 were the performance of an overture by Davidoff 

 and a cantata by Boukrieff, written for the oc- 

 casion ; the bestowal upon Rubinstein by the 

 Czar of an annuity of 3,000 rubles ; the gift of 

 honorary titles by the municipalities of St. 

 Petersburg and Peterhof and by the university 

 of the former ; and the production of the mas- 

 ter's new opera " Gorusha." Rubinstein added 

 to the festivities a piano recital, when he played 

 wonderfully. 



His remaining days were passed partly in St. 

 Petersburg and partly in Dresden, where he had 

 as a pupil the wonder child Josef Hofmann. 

 His life at St. Petersburg was devoted largely to 

 the interests of the conservatory, but in the 

 summer months he occupied his handsome resi- 

 dence at Peterhof, where he passed much of 

 his time in his fine library, for he was a great 

 lover of books, received visitors, and composed 

 incessantly. It was his ambition to earn a place 

 among the immortals, and, having failed to 

 achieve this by his symphonies or his operas, he 

 invented what he called the " sacred opera," a 

 form which was really neither opera nor oratorio, 

 but something half way between them. His old 

 age was full of bitter utterances, for he resented 

 the world's refusal to take him at his own valua- 

 tion. Men insisted upon calling him Rubin- 

 stein, the great pianist, when he wished them to 

 call him Rubinstein, the great composer. He 

 had many fine traits of character, and gave large 

 sums of money to charities. He died of heart 

 disease. 



His most important compositions, besides 

 those already mentioned, are his operas "The 

 Demon," " Nero," and " Kalashnikoff " ; his sa- 

 cred operas " Sulamith " and " Moses " ; his beau- 

 tiful piano concertos in G major and D minor ; 

 and his dramatic symphony. " Nero " was pro- 

 duced by the American Opera Company at the 

 Metropolitan Opera House, New York, on March 

 14, 1887, and had a moderate success. Rubin- 

 stein's piano compositions are extremely grate- 

 ful works for the soloist, and are to be found 

 in the repertoire of every public pianist. 

 VOL. xxxiv. 45 A 



The verdict of his contemporaries that he was 

 greater as a pianist than as a composer may not 

 be sustained by posterity, but it will certainly 

 remain an established fact of musical history 

 that as an interpreter of piano music Rubinstein 

 was a genius. His mastery of the instrument 

 assimilated all the excellences of earlier perform- 

 ers, and his own potent individuality refashioned 

 them so that they became his own personal ut- 

 terance. He extended the dazzling rapidity of 

 finger of Moscheles to unexpected limits, and 

 he elevated the graceful, elegant singing style of 

 Thalberg to a breadth of vocal effect attained by 

 no other player except Liszt. It was in grand 

 and massive effects, however, that Rubinstein 

 excelled. As a German critic said : " Beethoven 

 rushes from under his fingers like a gigantic 

 torrent, a piano sonata becomes a symphony, a 

 symphony played by him on the piano sounds 

 like an orchestral rendering." The secret of 

 Rubinstein's power lay in the powerful mind and 

 deep emotional force that guided and vitalized 

 his complete mastery of the technical resources 

 of his art. He felt the music which he played; 

 he had a profound intellectual grasp of its con- 

 tents, and he was able to convey his thought and 

 feeling to his hearers, swaying them with the 

 irresistible magnetism of an art that made a 

 direct and overmastering personal appeal. 



The death of Rubinstein was unexpected, and 

 the shock of it caused much inconsiderate talk 



of a great loss to art. As a composer Rubin- 

 stein had certain natural gifts, but they reached 

 their maturity years before his death. As a 



producer of music he had never anything of 

 world- wide value to offer to humanity ; as an in- 

 terpreter his work was done before he died. As 

 a performer, too, he stood second on the roll of 

 pianists, for Liszt was surely first. Both of 

 these men displayed genius in the purely inter- 

 pretative side of piano playing. But though 

 some of Rubinstein's intrinsically beautiful com- 

 positions for the pianoforte display a sympathetic 

 comprehension of the possibilities of the piano 

 far beyond that which can be discerned in the 

 works of men possessed of profounder musical 

 originality than he, they are manifestly the re- 

 sults of the experience of several decades of 

 piano playing, and are plainly not the pioneers 

 of any hitherto unknown region of the art. 

 Rubinstein was the embodiment of all that had 

 been learned by pianists from Bach to Liszt, but 

 Liszt was an explorer who opened up new fields. 

 He made revelations in the technical department 

 that caused piano playing to advance by leaps 

 and bounds, and he introduced forms' which 

 were indubitably the products of a vigorous and 

 original mind. Whatever we may choose to 

 think of Liszt music as music pure and simple, 

 we must award him the honor of having en- 

 larged the sphere of the pianoforte. This can 

 not well be' said of Rubinstein. His D minor 

 concerto, for example, ought to live as one of 

 the most beautiful compositions ever written for 

 the piano, but, like his other works, it raises no 

 artistic question and marks no artistic advance. 

 If such things are true of his piano works they 

 are equally true of his orchestral compositions. 

 Here, again, we find Liszt his superior. The 

 abbe invented the " symphonic poem," which at 

 once took a permanent place in music ; and he 



